The More You Weigh, The More You Pay

Meet Irwin Leba, a rich and reclusive Texan whose mission in life is to balance the budget by taxing the obese. Fat chance, right?

CONSIDERING EVERYTHING I'd heard about him, it took surprisingly little effort to convince Irwin Leba to sit down with me at a McDonald's off I-27, not far from his home outside Plainview, Texas. It was a cheap journalist's ruse, really: I knew full well that the parade of Big Mac gluttons was bound to get him riled. He accepted my invitation, I later found out, against the advice of his PR people in Washington.

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A pear-shaped Hispanic woman and her husky son lumber past our table, their trays stacked with McNugget boxes. I feel a boot kick me under the table. "Would you look at these fat asses?" he says. "Excuse me,'body-image-challenged individuals'--that's what we're supposed to call them these days." Leba scowls and twists uncomfortably in his seat.

"You want to know why the Chinese are beating us, not to mention the Koreans, the Cambodians, and the Laotians? I've been to the Orient. I've seen it myself. They eat all sorts of seaweed crap that we wouldn't feed to anything that didn't have four legs and go moo. Meanwhile, we've got these porkers"--he jerks his chin at a family of four that's happily enjoying lunch at a nearby table--"shoving triple-bacon Whoppers down their throats. Who do you think is going to have higher productivity?" He pauses. "Them."

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It is one of the delicious ironies of his life that Leba himself has a body image that is moderately challenged. In fact, he sports the sort of perfect paunch you could calculate pi off of. And with those Neil Young chops and the cowboy hat and the tight-fitting blue jeans, he looks more like a honky-tonk washout than one of the most open-walleted political donors in America.

Leba is a sixty-six-year-old recluse who seems to have materialized out of the dust of the Texas panhandle and would probably disappear just as quickly were it not for one fantastically audacious idea that he believes will be his patriotic legacy. That idea is called the fat tax.

If Leba has his way, sometime between January 1 and April 15, every American will have to visit a government-sponsored weigh station and step on a scale. You'll leave with a notarized certificate attesting to your body-mass index (BMI). If that number is 25.5 or higher--24.9 is officially the upper limit of normal--you'll have to pay Uncle Sam a little something extra, corresponding to how overweight you are and scaled to your income. (To calculate your own fat tax, see page 108.)

"Let's say you're five foot eight and you weigh 215 pounds--I'm just pulling these numbers out of the air," says Leba, though they actually seem to describe him pretty well. "You'd have a BMI of 32.7, which is disgustingly overweight. Now let's say you're in the highest tax bracket and you pulled in roughly $2 million last year. Under my plan, you'd be looking at a $70,000 fat tax"--and that's on top of your income tax. He takes a long sip of his Diet Coke. "That'll make you think twice before stuffing your face with goose-liver pâté, don't you think?"

Studies show that approximately 9 percent of all health-care costs in the United States are the result, either directly or indirectly, of obesity. "That's somewhere on the order of $80 billion being spent each year just because a few people think life is one big Vegas buffet," says Leba. "And about half that amount is paid by Medicare and Medicaid." Last year he founded a nonpro?t think tank, the Institute for a Healthy America (IHA), with the sole objective of trying to make the fat tax a reality. He says he has already spent $5 million of his own money promoting the idea, much of it, presumably, to pay the political pros who script the catchy rhetoric that flows steadily from his mouth. "Fair taxation for a cellulite nation--that's what this is about."

To provoke him, and also because I'm hungry, I'm nibbling on a large order of fries while we talk. I'm in the middle of a question about his libertarian critics when he reaches across the table, grabs a handful of my fries, and shovels them into his mouth. I'm floored. It's like I just watched the drug czar take a bong hit. Before he has even swallowed, he slams his fist on the table and curses himself: "Irwin, you're a goddamn good-for-nothing hogfucker."

He pulls out a billfold thick with Franklins and counts out four of them, then reaches over and tucks them into my breast pocket.

"I need you to hold on to these until we get back to Sweet Acres," he says, standing up to leave.

Um, okay.

Sweet Acres is Leba's sprawling ranch, named after the 1,144 sweet acres of Texas desert it spreads across. From the interstate, it's just a dot way off in the distance, linked to civilization--if that's what you want to call the surrounding brush--by a long, juniper-lined gravel road. The house itself is a supersized McMansion with massive Corinthian columns framing the porch.

"When I'm in New York or Boston or one of those places on the seaboard, people look down on me because they say I'm 'nouveau riche,' " he says, taking his hands off the wheel of his white Navigator to drop air quotes around that last phrase. "Out here, I'm just riche." In the center of his semicircular driveway, there is a twice-life-sized statue of nude Greco-Roman wrestlers grappling--a reminder of his days as a high school wrestler, he tells me--and a flagpole waving the largest American flag in the county. "Bigger is always better," he says, staring proudly up at the flag. "Except with people."

TWO WEEKS LATER, in mid-November, the phone in my D. C. apartment rings at 5:30 in the morning. "It's Irwin. You up? Mr. Leba's come to Washington. We're going down to the Hill today to dish out some Texas pork. Want to tag along?"

Those frequent references to livestock--in fact, the entire down-home Ross Perot twang--is pure reinvention. Though he doesn't readily admit it, a little digging into his background reveals that, like President Bush, Irwin Leba is a Northeast transplant. He was born Irwin Leibowitz in Brooklyn, the only son of a hotel maid and a subway conductor. During high school, he began working as a hot-dog vendor in front of the New York Public Library. He was a savvy entrepreneur, and by the time he was twenty-eight he owned a third of the hot-dog carts in the city.

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"Eventually I cashed out to a crime syndicate," he told me in an e-mail a few days after my visit to Plainview. "But the terms of the sale weren't entirely mutual."

Circumstances that he's not interested in revisiting forced him to leave New York for Dallas. He's lived in Texas ever since. In 1970, around the same time he had his "first powwow with Jesus Christ," he poured the lion's share of his hot-dog earnings into the stock of his favorite restaurant, McDonald's. At the time, it must have seemed like a chancy way to invest one's life savings. In retrospect, of course, it was pure genius. His $200,000 investment is now worth about $25 million.

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"Indirectly, through my stock holdings, I figure I've contributed to the deaths of many thousands of people--and not just Americans," he wrote. "If you want to get all psychoanalytical, you might say that the fat tax is my way of making amends."

We meet up later that morning at the nondescript office of Jake Bartoff, a K Street lobbyist who has been helping Leba formulate a strategy to woo congressional allies. With Bartoff's assistance, Leba has already appeared on countless radio talk shows. A new feature on the IHA's Web site, fattaxfacts.org, allows supporters of the tax to fire off a form letter to their representatives in Congress. Leba's especially fixated on winning the endorsement of Jerrold Nadler, the generously apportioned Democrat from Manhattan, going so far as to suggest listing the members of Congress in descending order of weight "to make sure Nadler's name is way up there." Bartoff talked him out of it.

We haven't been in the lobbyist's office for ten minutes before Leba rescinds his invitation to spend the day with him. "I've been talking things over with my friend in the pinstripe suit, and he thinks it'd be best if we didn't have a reporter in tow."

Until he cooked up the fat-tax idea, Leba had never been involved in politics, never made a single donation to either party, never, he says, even voted. But as loony as his proposal might sound, he has lined up an impressive bipartisan army of cheerleaders. Republicans like the idea because it would narrow the deficit through a national "consumption tax" rather than an increase in the income tax, and Democrats who can stomach the tax's discrimination against the overweight (who are disproportionately poor) see it as a powerful way to improve public health while also generating new funding for health care.

"The guy is off the reservation," says one Democratic congressional staffer who asked to remain anonymous. "But he has a massive trough of money that he's opened up to anyone who will give him an ear. I'm not sure there's a single guy on the House Subcommittee on Health who doesn't owe Leba something." He pauses, as though considering whether to continue. "Plus, the fat tax . . . it just might be good policy."

That afternoon, after Leba's power lunch with a group of southern Democratic congressmen, he calls me to apologize for his earlier rudeness and offers to pick me up in his limo. The car takes us across the Potomac to the Virginia offices of the IHA. When you enter the reception area, the first thing you see is an enormous poster of Uncle Sam pointing at you: I WANT YOU TO LOSE WEIGHT!

"These are my pencil heads," Leba says as he strolls through the office, introducing his staff of nearly a dozen lawyers, economists, nutritionists, and tax experts. "Not a one of them has a BMI over 26. I know because we weigh them on a weekly basis."

For the last several months, the IHA has been preparing draft legislation for a fat tax and circulating it around Washington for comments. Leba's pencil heads estimate that the fat tax could bring in as much as $150 billion a year in increased revenue for the federal government. It could also, they say, cut American obesity in half by 2013 and save 250,000 lives.

For all the crassness in how it's been promoted, the fat tax has won plaudits from health advocates. "The fat tax could be our antidote to the obesity epidemic," acknowledges a Centers for Disease Control researcher who requested anonymity. "On the other hand, we're a bit concerned that people will go on unhealthy crash diets just before they head to the scales."

Leba isn't alone in thinking government should use economic incentives to fight obesity. Both the British health ministry and the World Health Organization have endorsed the idea of a sin tax on junk food, as has the mayor of Detroit. But Leba doesn't consider them allies.

"The guys who want to tax fat food instead of fat people have got it all wrong. If you exercise and have a high metabolism, it's your right as an American to eat whatever the hell you want. If you're not in the ER having quadruple bypasses on Medicare's tab, if you're not making my day unpleasant by walking around in public in a muumuu, then the government shouldn't be punishing you with excessive taxes. That would be vaguely communistic."

Naturally, Leba has plenty of critics. I couldn't find a single obesity advocate who would even agree to an interview on the subject. (One of them called the very idea "fatist.") Legal scholars say it's probably an unconstitutional form of discrimination. And tax experts say it would be logistically impossible to implement.

But Leba won't be deterred by reality. Last year, in search of a public face for the fat tax, he made personal appeals to a handful of celebrities who have publicly battled with their weight. Kirstie Alley never even replied, nor did Oprah, Roseanne, or Al Roker. "Camryn Manheim told me to shove it," he says.

Then, on a trip to Denver last summer, Leba stepped into a hotel elevator with a man he could have sworn was Jared Fogle, the guy from the Subway commercials. It wasn't. "But it was his perfect doppelbanger," Leba says.

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Doppelgänger?

"Whatever. I don't speak French."

Leba followed the look-alike out of the elevator and propositioned him in the hallway. "I knew I had to have him, so I asked him right then and there if he'd star in a TV commercial for $30,000. He asked me if he'd have to get naked. I told him, 'No, just lose ten pounds.' "

The ads will begin running in targeted congressional districts on April 1, just two weeks before tax day.

BACK IN PLAINVIEW, Leba gives me a tour of Sweet Acres. The house is nine thousand square feet of profound emptiness. He doesn't have any children, or even any close family. He has never married, and he says he hasn't been on a date since Nixon was president. There are no photos on the walls, nothing to suggest that Leba is anything more than a house sitter in his own mammoth home. Only the TV room seems to be lived in. There's a sixty-inch flat-screen on the wall, and a single lonely La-Z-Boy in the center of the room. Leba has to pull a folding chair out of the closet so I can have a place to sit.

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"Would you believe that I used to be a total fat ass myself?" he asks, chuckling. "I've got this personal chef, a boy named Paul, who used to deep-fry Twinkies for me all the time. You ever had a deep-fried Twinkie? If you condensed all the goodness of Jesus Christ into one of those plastic wrappers, you'd have something that would be almost--but not quite--as divine as a deep-fried Twinkie." He catches himself. "Of course, Twinkies are a large part of what's wrong with America."

I tell Leba I've never had one before. Never even heard of such a thing.

"Hold on." He walks over to the intercom on the wall. "Paul, I've got a guest here who's never enjoyed the luxury of a deep-fried Twinkie. Can you fix that?" There's a pause before he presses the intercom again. "It's not for me."

You keep Twinkies on the premises?

"Just for guests."

Down in the kitchen, while Leba is in the bathroom, Paul explains to me that for the last seven years he's cooked only low-fat, low-carb, low-sodium meals for Leba. "We do lots of tofu, lots of greens," he says. "But I know Irwin munches on all sorts of stuff he's not supposed to when I'm not here. I confronted him about it once, but he got furious and threatened to fire me, so now I just keep my mouth shut."

On a pedestal near a vintage jukebox in Leba's kitchen, there's a huge glass jar filled three quarters to the brim with cash, IOUs, and personal checks. I pull out a check near the top that's made out to a Plainview animal shelter. It's for $4,000.

"Ah, the fat jar," says Paul. "You're going to have to ask Irwin about that."

When he returns from the bathroom, I do.

"In 1993, stewardesses started making me wear a seat-belt extension. It was humiliating," Leba says. "I looked at myself in the mirror one morning, and I said, 'Irwin, you're revolting. This has got to change.' I took this big pretzel jar and I emptied it. I decided I'd donate a little money to charity every time I ate something that I wasn't supposed to. For each gram of what I call 'unwarranted fat' that I ate, I'd put a dollar in the jar. It wasn't long before I realized that wasn't enough money to make me think twice. I upped it to five dollars, then ten, then twenty. Now it's a hundred. You start noticing that kind of money after a while. "Which explains the $400 he asked me to hold at McDonald's. As I reach into my shirt pocket and drop the bills in the jar, Leba walks across the kitchen and gazes wistfully at it.

"January 7, 1998. That's the day I figured out the fat tax. I was standing right where you're standing now. I'd just put a grand into the jar--it was a frozen Snickers, if I recall--and I was feeling pretty good about that, and I said to myself, 'Goddammit, Irwin, everyone ought to have a fat jar.' And then I said, 'What if government could be the fat jar?' And then I said, 'Goddammit, Irwin, that's the smartest thing you ever said to yourself.' "

Of course, for all its revenue-generating potential for local charities, Leba's fat jar has one fundamental shortcoming that he has somehow blinded himself to: While it may alleviate his guilt and temper his self-loathing, it doesn't seem to be making him any thinner. Wouldn't the same thing be true of the fat tax?

"That's hogshit," he retorts. "It's economics 101: The only thing people hate more than being fat is taxes."

Now that he's alone in the limo, out from under the thumb of Bartoff and his other PR handlers, Leba wants to have a little fun.

"One of the guys I had lunch with told me Nadler is going to be at the Palm for an early dinner," he tells me with a crack of his knuckles. "We're going to ambush him and give him the old Leba shakedown."

Since it's only 4:30, we end up idling in Leba's limo for an hour and a half in a no-parking zone in front of the restaurant on Nineteenth Street. When Congressman Nadler finally comes trundling down the block in a navy overcoat, Leba jumps out of the car and starts heckling him.

"C'mon, Jerry, how about a public debate? You and me on the fat tax. We'll keep it civil."

Nadler looks puzzled. Do I know this person? He doesn't answer, just keeps walking.

But Nadler won't bite. He won't even acknowledge him. It's almost as though Irwin Leba is not even there.

Leba tries one more time. "Afraid of how it'll look if the fattest man in Congress won't back the fat tax?"

Nadler slips into the restaurant and slams the door behind him, but not before Leba promises to FedEx him a can of Slim-Fast every day until the fat tax becomes law.

Leba smacks his thigh and pumps his fist. "We've got Jerry on the run." He skips back to the limo and steps inside. "He'll come around. He has to. The country needs him to."

He sinks back into the plush leather, a satisfied smile on his face. "America's affluence is what got us so fat in the first place, and it's the only way we'll ever get healthy again," he says. "This tax is a great idea, the only truly great one I've ever had. And I'm going to fight like hell to make it real."

What's your Fat tax?

TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH YOU WOULD OWE under irwin leba's fat tax, first go to fattaxfacts.org, click on "bmi Calculator," and get your body-mass index. if it's 25.4 or lower, you would owe nothing. but as soon as you hit 25.5, you would have to pay. Each point* above the limit is assessed a fixed amount that's scaled to your income (see table). For example, if your bmi is 27 and you made $150,000 last year, you'd owe a $2,000 fat tax. a million-plus earner with a bmi of 35 would owe a whopping $100,000.

INDIVIDUAL ANNUAL INCOME: $100,000 or less

FAT TAX (PER BMI POINT ABOVE THE LIMIT): $500

INDIVIDUAL ANNUAL INCOME: 100,001 to 500,000

FAT TAX (PER BMI POINT ABOVE THE LIMIT): 1,000

INDIVIDUAL ANNUAL INCOME: 500,001 to 1,000,000

FAT TAX (PER BMI POINT ABOVE THE LIMIT): 5,000

INDIVIDUAL ANNUAL INCOME: 1,000,001 and above

FAT TAX (PER BMI POINT ABOVE THE LIMIT): 10,000

* Decimal points within your bmi would be rounded up, never down. For example, a bmi of 25.5 would be assessed at 26; a bmi of 26.1 at 27.